Please, Mr. Postman: Go Away

The U.S. Postal Service may lose $10 billion in the fiscal year ending
Sept. 30, more than it had predicted, as mail volume continues to drop,
Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe said in testimony for a Senate
hearing.

The loss will leave the Washington-based service unable to make required
payments to the federal government and puts it at risk of default as it
reaches its $15 billion borrowing limit, Donahoe said in testimony
prepared for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee
hearing today.

We ought to close down the USPS. It was a government agency created to
solve a problem, and today that problem is solved, and we no longer need
a centralized federal monopoly to facilitate intercity communication,
the delivering of parcels, etc. News stories reporting the travails of
the USPS invariably note that the agency has been ravaged by e-mail, but
this gets things precisely wrong: E-mail has relieved us, nationally, of
the burden of maintaining a postal service for delivering letters. The
emergence of private couriers, FedEx, UPS, et al., have likewise
rendered USPS’s delivery services obsolete. Letters and other
“household to household” mail accounts for less than 10 percent
of USPS’s volume, most of which is junk mail.

But how will I get my copies of National Review? Oh, well,
they're
smart. They'll figure out something.

Kevin manages to be more radical than Cato; they
"merely" recommend privatization:

To avoid a large and growing burden from being foisted on taxpayers in
coming years, the USPS should be privatized and postal markets open for
competition from FedEx, UPS, and upstart entrepreneurs.

With privatization, Congress should end its micromanagement of the
nation’s postal services. It should rescind the complex laws and
regulations on delivery schedules, price caps, restrictions of facility
shut-downs, and other business decisions. Such congressional meddling
ultimately hurts the consumers that any postal business is supposed to
serve by pushing up costs.

Either works for me.

But (alas) the proposals actually floating around Congress are even more
moderate. Rep. Darrell Issa has a slick website up
with a countdown clock to the September 30 USPS default date,
a slick video, and a "play the Congressman" game. But he just wants
to get rid of some of the existing Congressional mandates on the USPS:
Saturday delivery, keeping teentsy post offices open, etc. We can do
better.

But in Issa's favor, the American
Postal Workers Union (APWU)
launched a broadside against him. His
legislation, they claim, "would destroy the Postal Service as we know
it." So that's a plus.

The APWU's interests are served by H.R.
1351, legislation introduced by Rep. Steve Lynch (D-MA).

Special note for Granite Staters: guess who's a co-sponsor of
H.R. 1351? Our very own RINO, Charlie Bass.

There are other worse proposals than Issa's. Here's
an op-ed by Senator Susan Collins (RINO-Maine) whose maine concern (heh)
is keeping the Post Office on tiny Matinicus Island, 20 miles offshore
from Rockland, open. Unsurprisingly, hers is a business-as-usual
approach.

For some reason, politicians talk about living in rural America as
though it were an involuntary disease whose sufferers deserve offsetting
federal subsidies. But nobody is forcing anybody to live in a remote
town in northern Maine. If you want to live there, you should pay a
market price to have things delivered to you. If you don’t like
paying for that, you can move. It’s not my responsibility to
subsidize your postal service so you can live the rural lifestyle you
enjoy at a below-market cost.

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